Business Faculty in the Land of the MOOCS

By Colin Nelson

As I mentioned in my last post, in both February and November of this year I examined a number of the better-known MOOC provider platforms to see how much of this new educational space involved management education. (Platforms examined included Coursera, edX, Udacity, Futurelearn, Canvas Network, and the Academic Financial Trading Platform (AFTP).) While my last post dealt with the rate of growth in institutions involved in MOOCs, in this post I am looking at the involvement of business faculty in this space. All faculty that are counted here were affiliated with a business school at the time they were counted, whether or not that school was a member of AACSB. The results were interesting, and not entirely what I expected:

Figure 1. Business Faculty Involved in MOOC Provision (2013)

Note: For Udacity and the Canvas Network, courses were frequently offered by instructors as individuals, many with no university affiliation. Those that did have such affiliation are included here.

Of those business faculty who were involved in MOOC provision, generally strong majorities were affiliated with AACSB-accredited schools, though this varied both by provider and by month. Business faculty providing MOOCs on Coursera, for example, were over 90 percent likely to be affiliated with an AACSB-accredited school when I looked in February, versus 61 percent in November as more non-accredited business schools became involved in MOOC provision. Canvas Network, by contrast, saw the percentage of faculty affiliated with AACSB-accredited schools rise from two-thirds to 70 percent.

Once again, while I expected that the number of faculty involved in MOOCs would grow over this period, particularly since there are now more institutions involved in MOOC provision, the pace of that increase is less than what I anticipated on most of the platforms I looked at. I'll be interested to see if the pace picks up if MOOCs become normalized as part of the higher (and management) education landscape.

Comments

[Colin Nelson]

Dear Ken,

AACSB International is not itself a business school or other institution of higher education. We are an accrediting body for collegiate business schools. If you're interested in learning more, please visit our website at www.aacsb.edu.

Best,
Colin

[Ken Paulinus]

We want to know your requirement, Did you offer free Business Courses online?.
Pls advice.